Rosie Garthwaite - How to Avoid Being Killed in a War Zone: The Essential Survival Guide for Dangerous Places

I do not agree with people who say that if God wanted you to die this day, you will, no matter what precautions you take. I believe God gave me a brain to do my best to avoid getting into such situations. Imad Shihab, Iraqi journalist

Your loved one is heading off to a war zone and you are saying goodbye. You want to give them a last piece of advice. Something that will come to them when they most need it. A moment of clarity in all that mess.

Dont be a hero, you say. Or, Remember, nothing is worth your life.

Trite. Not very useful and trite.

I want to say, Put me in your hand luggage and Ill protect you while you get on with whatever you need to do. But I dont either fit in their hand luggage or have the ability to fight off the enemy with one hand while holding onto them with the other.

So I usually hand them my lucky bracelet, which is a string of Buddhist prayer beads from northern India, though it could be mistaken for Muslim or Catholic beads, depending on the religion of the person who taps on your car window with their gun at a checkpoint. Theyve got me out of a couple of sticky situations before, I nod reassuringly, waving the loved one goodbye. What I dont say is that I would be there with my pop-up emergency-room doctor and missile defence shield if I could.

But that just aint enough.

My friend Sherine Tadros was heading to Gaza. Shes a reporter for Al Jazeera English and had the hostile-environment training we all need in order for our insurance to work in conflict areas. But that was three years before.

I cant remember how to do mouth-to-mouth, Rosie. Is it 30 breaths to two pumps?

The other way roundI think. And shes gone, to Jerusalem and then Gaza, before I can find anything more helpful to tell her.

Her one-night visit to Gaza turns into a four-month stint and a 23-day war. Shes deep into her first war zone, while me and my few meagre tips for survival are a time zone away.

There is a wealth of knowledge out there, but for some reason the vault of advice for people like Sherine and me was locked in other peoples memories and experience. This book aims to tap into that knowledge and bring it to a wider audience to people who find themselves running towards bombs rather than away, to those surrounded by disaster rather than watching it on TV. This book is for doctors, charity volunteers, NGO workers, engineers, government contractors, journalists, human rights lawyers and so many more of the worlds curious and curiouser who find themselves drawn to these places.

Its not just visitors who have to adapt. There are millions of people living in the midst of what has become routine conflict from Bogot to the Baltimore backstreets, from downtown Mogadishu to uptown Johannesburg, the West Bank and Beirut. They have learnt to adapt.

Over a shot of tequila you hear, Of course everyone knows thats a sure-fire way to get yourself killed.

The nervous laughs of others echo my thoughts I didnt.

People who return to war zones again and again listen to a story about someone who didnt survive, and their instincts tell them, That would never have happened to me. I would never have done that. Its what they tell their friends and family. A person would have to be suicidal to put themselves in a situation where they thought they might die every day. For people like them its a risk but a calculated risk.

Hostile-environment courses fit you with some armour to help you make that calculation. But they are textbook while war is messy. You can never be prepared. You dont know how you will react until it happens, and then it might be too late.

Courses are particularly bad at preparing you for the mundane issues that can be just as deadly as guns and bombs in a war zone boredom, hunger, lack of sex, too much sex, alcohol, lack of alcohol, getting fat and unfit, adrenalin rushes with nowhere to go.

What you can do is listen to as much advice as possible from people who have spent years dodging bullets and dancing through minefields.

Heres the disclaimer. Youll find while reading this book that different peoples experiences can lead them to opposite conclusions. The tips are rarely what you might find in an average instruction booklet. They sometimes break rules and protocol, but they worked for the individuals in this book and they could work for you. Treat it as a guide to help you make the choices that are right for you.

I have dipped my toe into a semi-war zone, spending around six months in Basra after the Iraq war in 2003. I was 22 years old and straight out of Oxford University, earning the local rate of $10 a day as a Reuters stringer. How did I survive? I poached a translator off the British Army. He was the size of a tank, a body builder. When I refused to let him bring a gun inside the bombed-out house where we lived, he brought life-size posters of Arnold Schwarzenegger to scare off potential intruders. Armed with my blonde hair and a practised smile, I tried to remember everything I had picked up during a year working as a British Army officer after leaving school.